Lecture Materials and Resources

People

Travis Timmerman is currently an assistant professor of
philosophy at Seton Hall University. He completed his PhD in
Philosophy at Syracuse University in May 2016. Before he was at
Syracuse, he did his undergraduate work in philosophy and political
science at Arizona State University. He also completed a
master’s in political science at ASU with a focus on
political theory and American politics. His research interests are
in ethics, death, and epistemology.

Neil Williams is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the
University at Buffalo, and Department Chair. His work is in
the metaphysics of science (causal powers especially) and
includes publications in the nature and classification of
disease.

Philip Reed, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at
Canisius College, where he works on ethics, applied ethics, and
moral psychology. His primary research interest in bioethics is the
doctrine of double effect.

Harvey Berman is a pharmacologist responsible for teaching
Doctors of Pharmacy (PharmD) and of Medicine (MD) in the Jacobs
School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. His teaching and
research interests are in adverse drug interactions,
pharmacogenomics, ethics of drug clinical trials, pain palliation
and geriatric pharmacology.

Yuichi Minemura's research interests are bioethics, metaphysics,
and ontology. He examines how we begin to exist, persist, and cease
to exist in virtue of the analysis of personal identity. In 2017,
he earned a Ph.D. in the Department of Philosophy, SUNY University
at Buffalo. The title of his dissertation is ‘A Metaphysical
Analysis of the Contemporary Brain Death
Controversies.’ Minemura has published several articles
on the basis of the arguments discussed in each chapter of the
dissertation.

Stephen Wear, Ph.D. is Associate Professor Emeritus and founding
former co-Director of the Center for Clinical Ethics and Humanities
in Health Care at the University at Buffalo. He is the ethics
officer at the Buffalo VA Medical Center where he leads the
IntegratedEthics program. He had been responsible for the
stewardship of the Patrick and Edna Romanell Fund for Bioethics
Pedagogy since its inception.

Wear's research interests span the range of clinical ethics, but is
particularly focused on informed consent. He is the author of many
articles and book chapters on various topics as well as a book on
informed consent. He has been the primary source for medical ethics
education at the University at Buffalo for more than three
decades.​

Robert Kelly is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of
Philosophy at the University at Buffalo. His research has included
work in experimental philosophy, cognitive science of religion, and
ethics. His main research interests are in ethics, in particular,
issues surrounding free will and moral responsibility, especially
as they relate to addiction. Kelly's current research concerns
questions about the nature of addiction, whether and to what extent
addicts are morally responsible, and the nature of control in
addiction.

Neil Feit is a Distinguished Teaching Professor of Philosophy at
the State University of New York at Fredonia. He has published two
books and over 20 articles, most of which appear in leading
international journals of philosophy. Feit’s interest in
bioethics and related topics dates back to 2002, when he published
a widely cited article on the badness of death. More recently, in a
series of papers on the metaphysics and moral significance of harm,
Feit has done work on several issues concerning the foundations of
bioethics and the nature of disease.

James Delaney is a professor of philosophy and Rose Bente
Lee-Ostapenko Endowed Director of Professional Ethics at Niagara
University. His current research examines traditional questions in
philosophy and how emerging technology in science and medicine
affect the issues involved in them.

Timothy J. Madigan, Ph.D, is Professor and Chair of Philosophy
at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, New York, and the founder
of its Irish Studies Program. Madigan’s areas of interest
include Medical Ethics, Political Philosophy, Philosophy of
Religion, and Popular Culture and Philosophy. He is the President
of the Bertrand Russell Society and the former President of the
Northeast Popular Culture Association. Madigan was the first editor
of the Romanell Center’s “Bioethics Bulletin.”

Catherine Nolan defended her dissertation, The Ethics and
Metaphysics of Vital Organ Donation, at SUNY Buffalo in 2015.
She is presently an affiliate associate professor at the University
of Dallas. She is interested in questions at the intersection of
metaphysics and bioethics. Her dissertation focused on the
definition of death and the impossibility of diagnosing it with
certainty in time to explant vital organs, concluding that it is
more practical to attempt to avoid causing death than to diagnose
death.

Jake Monaghan is a Ph.D. candidate at the University at Buffalo.
He works on topics in bioethics and political philosophy. His
dissertation is on consent in medicine and politics. He has
published on moral status in the Journal of Medicine and
Philosophy and Environmental Values, on the ethics of
law enforcement in the Journal of Political Philosophy, and
on epistemic closure (with James Beebe) in Oxford Studies in
Experimental Epistemology. During the 2017-2018 academic year
he will be a Humane Studies Fellow.

David Limbaugh is a Ph.D. candidate at the University at
Buffalo. He received an M.A. in Philosophy of Religion and Ethics
from Talbot School of Theology in 2014. As part of his research,
David worked as an associate ethics consultant at the Veterans
Affairs Hospital in Buffalo during the 2015 and 2016 calendar
years. His philosophical interests are in religion, medicine,
applied ethics, and, metaphysics. His dissertation is in the
metaphysics of science and develops a metaphysics of modality that
centers around dispositional properties that primitively represent
how reality could be. While completing his dissertation he
continues to work on projects on the nature of disease, on the
moral cost of implicit bias, and in philosophical theology.

David Hershenov, Ph.D., is a professor of philosophy at the
University at Buffalo and the co-director of the Romanell Center.
His earlier research was focused upon issues at the intersection of
personal identity and bioethics. His more recent research interests
are in the philosophy of medicine.

Jack Freer M.D. is a clinical professor of Medicine at the
University at​ Buffalo, and the co-director of the Romanell
Center. He is the course coordinator of IDM 701, the required
medical students' clinical ethics course. He organized and chairs
the Romanell Clinical and Research Ethics Seminar. His interests
include a wide range of clinical ethics issues, particularly those
related to surrogate decisionmaking.

Jelena Krgovic's research interests are primarily in philosophy
of psychiatry, philosophy of medicine and existentialism. She holds
a Ph.D in philosophy in 2016 from SUNY at Buffalo where she wrote
her dissertation "Existential Psychoanalysis and the Nature of
Mental Disorder”. In the dissertation she focuses on
providing a new definition of mental illness — one that
starts by understanding mental health, and takes into account
phenomenological understanding of the person as a whole in order to
delineate between disvalued behavior, human suffering and mental
illness. Her approach to this problem draws on Sartre's philosophy,
especially his existential psychoanalyses of Flaubert and Jean
Genet. She is currently working on the significance and role of
communication in mental disorder.

Peter Koch is a professor of philosophy at Villanova University
in Philadelphia, PA. After receiving his PhD from SUNY Buffalo, he
completed a Clinical Ethics Fellowship at the Center for Medical
Ethics and Health Policy, Baylor College of Medicine. Peter has
worked as a clinical ethics consultant at the V.A. Hospital of
Western New York and Houston Methodist Hospital, where he has
completed over 100 clinical ethics consultations. He has published
on the metaphysics of death, informed consent, medical
professionalism, reproductive ethics, and the ethics of intensive
care. His current research interest is in theories of patient
welfare and how these theories inform biomedical ethics.

Dr. Craenen is an ophthalmic surgeon and a clinical bioethicist
in the VA Western New York Healthcare System at Buffalo. He got his
MD and an MS from The Ohio State University and his MBE for The
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven with stints at the Radboud
Universiteit Nijmegen and the University of Padova. His interests
include publication ethics, Informed Consent and the ethics of
surgical simulation.

Yishai Cohen, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of philosophy and
liberal studies at the University of Southern Maine. He completed
his PhD in philosophy at Syracuse University, and did his
undergraduate work in philosophy at Southern Methodist University.
His research interests are in the philosophy of agency, ethics, and
philosophy of religion. Much of his work focuses on free will and
moral responsibility, and their apparent incompatibility with a
deterministic universe. He is also interested in foundational
questions concerning population ethics.

As an undergraduate, Barry Smith studied mathematics and
philosophy at the University of Oxford, before earning his Ph.D.
from the University of Manchester in 1976. Currently, he holds the
position of Julian Park Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and
Adjunct Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Computer Science, and
Neurology at the University of Buffalo in New York.

Adam Taylor, Ph.D., is a UB Philosophy alumnus, and has been a
(full-time) lecturer in philosophy at North Dakota State University
in Fargo since 2013. His research interests are primarily in
metaphysics and the philosophy of religion with a healthy sideline
in ethics and well-being.